Deloitte Insights Video

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The Accidental CIO

Barbara Prutzman is an experienced, award-winning IT executive with a reputation as a trailblazer for women in IT, yet she didn’t set out with those lofty accomplishments in mind.

Successful careers in business, sports, and other realms often are described in language suggesting an uninterrupted upward trajectory. We hear about “his meteoric rise to fame,” “her advancement through the ranks,” or “his climb up the corporate ladder.”

Barbara Prutzman, in contrast, says her career path, while successful by all accounts, looks more like a bread knife—serrated. Prutzman began her career in technical sales at IBM over three decades ago, and has held technology leadership positions at Campbell Soup Company, Scott Paper Company, and Aramark. She most recently worked as senior vice president and CIO at Univar Inc.

Success mythology aside, the ins and outs of Prutzman’s career are not at all unusual, especially among women, who disproportionately navigate overlapping personal and professional paths throughout their careers.

Nor is every successful career carefully planned and deliberately pursued, despite what leadership development programs teach. For some, like Prutzman, the motivation comes from the work of the day, or maybe the month, from loving the work, and knowing it matters to somebody in the here and now.

In November, Prutzman addressed a group of next-generation CIOs at Deloitte University—at one point jokingly calling herself “the accidental CIO.” Early in her career, she neither expected nor planned that in the future she’d assume executive roles at multiple large corporations. Yet she continually focused on learning and welcomed new challenges, readying herself for whatever came her way, and (usually) saying yes when opportunity knocked. “Every one of those experiences helped me develop and gave me competencies I needed to be a CIO,” she says.

For example, being recruited from the outside for a first-time CIO role is a very different experience from being chosen from within. A newly arrived CIO may be moving to a new industry, to a company of a markedly different size, or to a new geographic region—and those may be some of the easier adjustments. When Prutzman moved from Divisional IT Director at Campbell Soup to CIO at Scott Paper at age 42, she felt well prepared to take on the technology oversight and even found similarities between the two industries. “Except for some regulatory requirements, making tomato soup and making toilet paper are not that different,” she says. The hard part was figuring out the Scott Paper culture, how IT fit into it, and how to team with the rest of company.

Woven into her narrative, Prutzman offered this advice for CIOs:

Strive to be understood. Some CIOs want to talk about network problems or architecture; Prutzman tied it back to soup or toilet paper. Business people really don’t want to understand what you do, but you need to understand what they do. And, of course, everyone wants more than you can give them. Believe it or not, telling them “no” will earn their respect and trust.

Earn your team’s respect. The CIO title may get you a modicum of respect from your own team but you still need to earn it. As CIO, your job is to develop a talent agenda, assess talent, build a talent structure if the company lacks one, and continually refresh.

Know yourself. Part of growing into an executive role is having a healthy understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Prutzman attributes her success to her innate leadership skills more than any other single attribute. She likes to accomplish things with or through other people, and prefers to see others succeed rather than stand in the limelight.

Act with integrity—always. Whether a successful career is built according to plan or comes into focus move over move, honesty and integrity trump all. More than once, Prutzman made a career decision—including one that had her effectively demoting herself—with integrity as her main criteria. She’s never once regretted those decisions.

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Having returned from the Northwest to the Delaware Valley she calls home, Prutzman will apply the technical expertise and business acumen she acquired in her CIO roles to her own consultancy as well as to board and philanthropic work. Given the growing strategic emphasis being placed on the IT function across most industries, boards are actively seeking members with Prutzman’s personal brand of integrity, leadership, and experience. There’s nothing accidental about that.